Economic damages attributable to climate change in the Northeastern United States from 2011 Storm Irene

As global temperatures rise, extreme weather events are increasingly causing damages across human health, infrastructure, agriculture, and the broader economy. The science of event attribution is evolving to include estimates of economic damages attributable to climate change in addition to physical impacts. A key challenge in this field is to create physically consistent and high-resolution counterfactuals which can be used to estimate to attributable losses.

Here, we analyse the precipitation-driven impacts of Storm Irene in August 2011 when it was undergoing extratropical transition in the Northeastern United States. Across the Northeast United States, this storm caused rainfall of up to 180 mm within a few hours, leading to fluvial and pluvial flooding with catastrophic consequences that caused  more than $1.3 billion in property damages in the state of Vermont alone.
Our method enables linking economic damages attributable to climate change to meteorological drivers through a direct modelling chain by combining an operational weather forecasting model, hydrodynamic model, and economic damage model.

This research underscores the potential of interdisciplinary attribution methodologies to inform climate risk assessments in insurance and provide an evidentiary basis for climate-related liability.